In order to view this poem with the line breaks the author intended, we suggest reading it on a computer screen or in landscape orientation on your phone or tablet.

Driving Home from My Brother’s Memorial

Half-familiar faces time-traveled
out of the fog of aging. Not a one
can be returned to that glory we spent
so cheaply as though it were nothing.
My brother’s sequence of selves in
the photos heartbreaking handsome.

How late it is now for everything—
broad shadows crawling from under the lowest
hummocks show how far the sun is declined.
Last year’s weeds lift as if on fire from
the darkening ground, this first spring without him.
I watch the farmhouses pass, each in its
own plot of shadow, and think of the people
living in them, wish happiness for them all.

—
Thomas R. Smith is a poet, essayist, editor, and teacher living in western Wisconsin. He is the author of ten volumes of poetry, most recently Medicine Year (Paris Morning Publications), and has edited several books as well including The Garden Entrusted to Me: Essays on Poetry and the Writing Life by Robert Bly (forthcoming from White Pine Press). His first prose work, Poetry on the Side of Nature: Writing the Nature Poem as an Act of Survival (Red Dragonfly Press), seeks to join imagination and activism in the nature poem.

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